Two Rivers Correctional Institution sits about 100 yards from a bucolic bulge in the Columbia River called Lake Wallula. But prisoners inside seldom, if ever, see this grand green pool of water and the irrigated crops beyond.

For the great majority of the 1,741 inmates locked in the prison's medium-security wing, it's a bit like serving time at a mall – but only if the mall were choked with dimly lit tiers and prison cells with scarce views of the outside world. Daylight pours into the prison's 14 shoe-shaped recreation yards, but the walls are so high they block the horizon.

Only the well-behaved few who earn time on the "incentive yard," on the eastern side of the prison near Umatilla, ever see a horizon. Even through chain-link fences, the yard provides a spectacular view across the lake and the camelback hillsides of eastern Washington.

Manuel Arteaga, a 27-year-old dad serving five years for burglary and robbery, remembers his release from the medium-security prison to the minimum-security lockup, which holds 121 inmates on the Two Rivers complex.

Inside Oregon prisons

One out of 269 Oregonians is imprisoned: 13,362 men and 1,270 women in 14 prisons, their combined population greater than such cities as La Grande and The Dalles.

Prison officials recently offered a reporter and photographer extraordinary access to three prisons in eastern Oregon. We talked to inmates in the cells they call “houses,” in dining halls and barbershops, at job sites and recreation yards – even in “the hole” where inmates are sent for bad behavior.

We’re starting an occasional series on Oregon prisons with a look inside the wire. We’ll follow with stories on specific programs and looks inside other prisons.

The prisons are like night and day, he said. Medium-security prisoners are locked in tight, their movements choreographed and closely watched, while minimum-security inmates sleep in a vast dormitory and enjoy greater freedoms – including a big, open-air recreation yard.

Arteaga recalls standing on the yard and becoming overwhelmed with emotion as he watched the sun – a big, glorious orange ball – slide behind a distant ridge. It was the first time in years that he'd seen the setting sun.

"I was so excited," he remembered. "I called my girlfriend: 'I just saw a sunset.'"

His girlfriend, who couldn't possibly comprehend his enthusiasm for the daily spectacle most of us take for granted, ribbed him a little.

"You're a dork," he recalled her saying.

Arteaga had to laugh at himself. But the sunset, and those that followed, made him work harder to redeem himself, to get home to his children, to make them proud of him. He threw himself into parenting classes. Recently, he was admitted into a prison program that trains low-risk inmates to fight wildfires.

Prison officials say the Two Rivers complex, which opened for inmates in late 1999, was designed as an education and work facility for longer-term inmates, where many earn GEDs.

What sets the medium-security prison apart is that all of the housing units in the big rectangle are self-contained to minimize inmate movements and cut down on costs. For instance, rather than sending inmates to a chow hall, food trays are delivered to each housing unit on warming carts.

Each unit has its own recreation yard, where the July sun dries the grass blond and the sounds of basketballs echo off high walls. From the yards, all you can see of the outside world is a patch of sky. From there, it's hard to imagine the world beyond.